For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, approximately 70% of the stuff that makes up the cosmos consists of dark energy, an unknown force that pushes space to expand. And another 25% consists of dark matter, a mysterious material that holds galaxies together. But semantically speaking, dark energy and dark matter are… Source For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. ...

Most newcomers judge a betting site by the size of its welcome offer, then rarely open the promotions page again. That habit leaves money on the table. The recurring, specialized deals that run quietly in the background, weekly rebates, tournament prize pools, and event-tied boosts, often return more value over a year than a single sign-up bonus ever could.  For Canadian players juggling several accounts, knowing which niche promotions exist and how they actually pay out is wh...

There’s a new paper out called “PivCo-Huffman” (HTML version with annotations here ) and it’s very interesting. Normal Huffman decoding (and, to a lesser extent, encoding) is inherently quite serial. We can get explicit parallelism by using multiple streams , which scales just fine to moderate numbers of streams – something like 4-8 is usually not an issue. Not very suitable for vectorization or wide vector machines like GPUs, though: every extra stream adds signaling overhead in t...

(All references in this blog post can be found in the main article the post is about which is  here .) Recall that \(R(s,k)  \) is the least \(n\) so that, for all 2-colorings of the edges of \(K_n\), there is either a RED \(s\)-clique or a BLUE \(k\)-clique. \(R(k,k)\) has been well studied and is often called \(R(k)\). However, today we are concerned with \(R(s,k)\) \(s\) is fixed and \(k\) goes to infinity. 1) In 1995 Jeong Han Kim showed \(R(3,k)\) is asy \(\Theta(\frac{k^2}{\log k})\). At...

The most stubborn facts are those of the spirit, not those of the physical world. — Jean Gottmann, Geography and International Relations In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief : “a European war would be economically disastrous, the moneyed classes won’t let it happen”. Europe went to war anyways, and the war was in fact an economic disaster as everyone knew it would be. Why were those people wrong? Because the rich were not in control : the Tsar and t...

sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python's default sqlite3 package , including support for complex table transformations , automatic table creation from JSON data and a whole lot more. I released sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 , the first release candidate for sqlite-utils v4. The major version bump indicates some (minor) backwards incompatible changes, so I'm interested in hav...

Gentle A gentler world begins in the way you touch your heart. Be soft with the light inside you. Caress your body with this breath. God is nothing else but the place where the sun comes up in your chest. You are the glimmering destination. You are the golden honey daubed on the bread of the ordinary. Whatever is perfect, whatever is heavenly, begins here. — Fred LaMotte Do not bargain to be loved.  Do not negotiate.  When love is withheld as a punishment, as a manip...

If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected. As I wrote in a previous post , I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before official...

SAN DIEGO (June 22, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense technology company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Aechelon Technology, Inc , a leader in high-fidelity simulation, physics-based sensor modeling, and synthetic reality technologies. The transaction follows the successful close of Shield AI’s $2 billion strategic financing package, which includes $1.5 billion in Series G funding and $500 million in pr...

The fox continues to prowl around our chickens. This morning we caught it in the GARDEN a few feet from our favourite chicken. Luckily the magpies warned us and we were able to scare it away. It's not nice keeping the little cluckers cooped up in this heat, but needs must unfortunately. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email ,...

Watching the development of AI harnesses is really interesting for a ton of reasons. It is ground zero for agentic development, a large amount of the work is open source, and every major player thinks that they are in a winner takes all race so the enginering teams are large and incredibly talented. Claude Code alone will probably be processing $100bn a month in tokens in the next year so every single choice has large consequences, if they aren't executing better than everyone else they will qui...

The Apollo 14 Lunar Module, with its 7° tilt apparent in the picture. The onboard astronauts looked out the module’s window often to ensure it was not tipping over. Image: NASA / David Harland For NASA to safely land 12 astronauts on the Moon with the Apollo missions , a lot had to go right. But before it could even attempt Apollo, the agency needed to know what our Moon is like up close. Worrying about the basic nature of the lunar surface and soil may sound mundane now but it was a big un...

The other week I was the MC for day 2 of CSS Day conference . It was my first time ever being an MC for a conference! I was so excited and, honestly, very nervous at the start. My hands were shaking a lot, and it's no wonder, as Bruce Lawson had been the MC of the previous day, and that's a tough act to follow. And if I can’t be funny on the spot, I will try to make up for it in other ways . I ended the day with the following: Throughout the day, when introducing our wonderful spea...

Old Buildings on the Darro, Granada by David Roberts, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: This week IFP p...

Hello, Good news today Circuit network Klonan We have several more circuit network improvements to share with you today. Boiler/Heat exchanger circuit connection The Boiler type entities can now be connected to the circuit network, which makes it super easy to set up backup or emergency power conditions. You will also notice the beautiful new Heat exchanger graphics and working animation by Zsolti. Land mine Land mine was less o...

In April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, evap leak, & tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanic’s, combined with a delayed shipment. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 I was riding back in a tow truck. In April my car was in the shop three times. It was suppo...

The lines between transactional systems, analytical systems, hybrid systems, and shared storage architectures are getting blurry. This post proposes a small taxonomy for describing the different ways systems, workloads, storage tiers, visibility, and durable copies relate to each other. OLTP, OLAP, HTAP, and now LTAP? We can think of the first two as two types of workload which have specialized query engines and storage systems to support them. OLTP such as the RDBMS like Postgres and MySQL use ...

A few weeks ago, I learned about the removeprefix method in Python. It lets you remove a specific prefix from the beginning of a string. For example, I can use the following code to remove www. from the beginning of a domain name: "www.jamesg.blog" . removeprefix ( "www." ) If the string doesn’t contain the prefix, nothing happens; if the string does contain the prefix, the prefix is removed. Note: If you are parsing URLs in Python, you should use a library like urllib.parse to extra...

When I was a kid, most people did not know how to type. We took typing class. The final exam was a speed test: words per minute. Today, you will not impress anyone by saying you can type. In fact, cursive writing is fading. Kids increasingly cannot read or write it. We type constantly. We forget how many skills are learned, and how often some of these skills have faded. But not everything fades. Socrates would be immensely popular today as a teacher. I still buy and recommend paper books. Is...

Shane Hickey wrote in the Guardian back in May, quote marks added: Criminals use a variety of tactics to convince people that they are from McAfee and are becoming more sophisticated with advances in “artificial intelligence”, according to the company. There’s a broader discussion about the necessity of such AV tools, and McAfee’s own… shall we say, history! If you have a spare half an hour on your Sunday, do check out the history of the company and its eccentric former CEO;...

I ran into the classic “ range over a channel ” leak while working on a custom cron scheduler. I’ve debugged it on prod many times before, but writing one myself in a small piece of code reminded me how easy it is to write bugs like this even when you know about it. Here: on each tick, the scheduler dispatches the jobs that are due each job reports its outcome on a channel one collector ranges over that channel to record the run // cron/scheduler.go func tick ( due ...

SumatraPDF is a Windows GUI application for viewing PDF, ePub and comic books written in C++. Lately I do a lot of my SumatraPDF coding with AI agents: Claude Code, Grok Build, OpenAI Codex. They’re good at writing code. They’re less good at knowing if the code works, especially for GUI apps. The problem: agents don’t drive UI well Say I ask an agent to fix a bug in PDF text search, or in the new feature that translates selected text via an LLM. How does the a...

Once upon a time in march 2026 mimi hehe that event was interesting - exciting starts but I do find it a bit weird when people say "The Al did this", "the robot told me" and " it works with the Humans" Jess's talk was most interesting to me mimi Jess's talk was most interesting to me chee yes LOVED this, did i tell you i asked her to submit a demo some days pass mimi it happened again! "Claude did this", "me and Claude" is everyone always consciously making a little joke when...